They were in Finder’s head, too, but he couldn’t make sense of the sound.

“It hurts,” he mewled weakly. His claws scratched uselessly at the rubbery floor of the ship, and his spherical bulk wobbled and writhed in place. “Too much— noise—”

To Khadam, it was more than the piercing, ringing sound.

She could hear voices, too.

This was not the after-effects of the Vision, the shared disease of all humankind. No, she had cut that spasm off, with the help of Rodeiro’s implant, before it started. This was something else. Something in the here and now.

No matter where she went in the ship, she could hear them. Though they did not say her name, she could feel that they were talking to her. Cursing her.

Come... Out… God… Thing...

Each word was spoken by a different voice. Each voice was its own specially-shaped tool, drilling into her mind. This one was harsh and wrenching, that one like the pierce of a needle, and that one scraping against her skull. Between the words, there was a high ringing sound that made her want to tear her hair out.

“Who are you?!” she shouted at the ceiling. “Who’s doing this?”

“Khadam,” Finder crept closer, his claws thumping lightly on the rubbery floor of the ship as he curled his bulk against her, “Please. It hurts.”

One look at his face screen - the pixels were flashing madly - and she could tell he wouldn’t last long with this.

Come… Out… and… Die!

Khadam impulsed a command with her skull implant. It conjured up an interface only she could see, and her eyes danced back and forth through her diagnostics. Suddenly, the ringing sound flared, making her wince and gasp with pain.

But she saw what she needed to see.

“They’re spiking the aerisnet,” she said. Shoving so much nonsense “information” that the whole net was awash with the scratching, ringing, cascading over to trip the thresholds thousands of times a second.

The solution couldn’t be simpler. Thankfully, she knew the administrative commands by heart, because she couldn’t imagine trying to hear the words over that incessant ring and the menus were completely scrambled by the feedback of the sound. She walked through the menus and muted the threshold alarms, for her own receiver, for Finder’s, and for the whole ship.

The ear-piercing ring went suddenly silent.

Finder gave a digitized gasp, and his claws slumped with relief.

“Better?” she asked.

“A miracle,” he said, as he flashed his screen off and on a few times to clear it, “Thank you.”

All that was left in the aerisnet were the voices - scratchy and distorted, spoken from crude mouths.

“Do you hear them, now?” She asked.

“I don’t hear anything.”

Another… Godthing…

The voice was a chittering buzz, like insectoid jaws clapping and grinding against each other, making sounds they modulated into words.

How did it learn our language?

Khadam had been hunted before. This was nothing she couldn’t handle. But if she didn’t have to listen to death threats, well, why should she?

She impulsed a command through the aerisnet, once more attempting to dive into the admin backend. The aerisnet said something back, but she couldn’t hear it over their scratching voices.

Kill… You… Eat… You...

“Override,” she said.

The admin responded, though it was drowned out by the chittering of voices. And then, when the aerisnet decided there was no one with proper privileges within range, because the whole grid was down, it reverted command to her.

“Mute.”

The aerisnet went silent. The voices, too.

Blessed silence. Now, the voices could talk all they wanted - talk themselves to death - and she didn’t have to hear a word of it.

“Are you alright?” Finder asked. He had pushed himself up on his claws again, and there were worry lines etched on his pixelated face. “What was that?”

“Not sure. But I think I know what happened to our friend outside.”

“That sound killed him?”

“Something like that,” she said, trying not to think too hard about how it could’ve happened. But why hadn’t he just muted the voices? Maybe he didn’t know how…

What a way to go. Whoever he was, he’s gone now. May he rest easy.

She was sitting at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the habitation quarter. Everything around her was covered in a fine layer of dust - from the stairs and the handrails, to the junked machinery and cargo crates of the main hold.

Dust and shadows.

“Finder,” she said, “Can you help me make sure there are no other entrances? And if there are, we need to block them up. I’ll take the main hold. You start with the upper decks. I had to mute the aerisnet, so shout if you find anything.”

Finder nodded, and then began the long trek of hauling his body up the stairs. She could hear the rubber thumps of his claws, followed by the clunking bulk of his body as he walked like a four-legged spider up the metal steps. She would have to find a way to fix his repulsors, if she could. But right now, the most important thing was to make sure the nomads didn’t have an alternate entrance into the ship.

And if they did?

A weapon. That would be best.

But down in the main holds, all she could find were old metal support rods, as heavy and unwieldy as they were long, made to secure the gear and cargo while in flight. Still, it was better than nothing.

She stalked around the crates - most of them still tied down - holding the rod up against her shoulder like a heavy spear, ready to swing at anything. Emergency lights glowed to life, weak and blue, as she walked through the cramped gaps between the enormous cargo creates.

At the back of the hold, the gates were piled up underneath the hold’s cargo crane. Dumped like old, useless trash.

She checked the calibration on a few of them, and it looked like whoever had been here before had set them all at random. Biologists. They had no idea what they were doing. At the front of the hold, where the metal disc of the arming pad connected to the reactor, she counted no less than eight of those arms. They were slagged. Melted to the disc itself.

You can’t just throw energy at it and expect it to work, Khadam thought. Idiots.

But even if she could get the disc cleaned up - even if she could calibrate the gates and get one of them working - it still changed nothing. The reactor was empty. What little energy the reactor had left was probably wasted on turning the arms into slag.

Why didn’t they bring someone who knew how to use the gates?

Maybe they had.

Maybe they didn’t make it out of cryosleep. And with the grid down...

And what am I supposed to do now?

She knew what she needed to do. Her wrist implant had been screaming at her for the last few hours. Days, even. She was ragged, and she could feel her exhaustion tearing holes in her patience.

Sleep.

But until the ship was absolutely secure, she couldn’t imagine shutting her eyes. So Khadam tore herself away from the slagged gates and the empty reactor, and continued her slow crawl around the hold, wading through the rotten debris and broken scraps of metal, searching for gaps in the hull.

Finder came back an hour later, carrying tubes of vacuum-grade sealant. “I patched a few minor fractures, and I found a few points of serious structural damage. This ship wasn’t meant to land on its belly like this. I don’t think it will fly again.”

“Did you see any places where the nomads might find a way in?”

“No. It seems the last inhabitants blocked up the entrances well enough. They welded the side entrances shut, and then welded more metal over them.”

“Any luck finding the shipwright’s gauntlet? Or, you know, any other tools at all?”

“I’m sorry. I was unable.”

“What about a bed?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of those.”

“Show me.”

He lead her through the dark, dust-covered decks of the ship, a few levels above the main hold. A narrow hallway that split up into cramped cabins, closets and a washroom. Several of the doors were broken, or simply locked shut. Maybe she’d figure out a way to cut those open later, but for right now she just wanted to sleep. So when Finder showed her a room with a narrow mattress and a tiny bedstand table, she didn’t think twice. She stumbled in, and collapsed on the bed. Her last words that day were, “Can you keep watch?”

She didn’t even hear Finder’s clicking response, before she was asleep.

The Vision haunted her sleep. The same dream that every human shared. The dream that split humanity into pieces, and forced them to scatter across the stars, to live only in the smallest clans.

The change is inevitable. At least, that’s what the cynics said. The ones who gave up.

When the dreams first began, many held hope humanity would find a way to cut it short. Only, the years dragged on without answers. Many went mad, or decided that a life so haunted was not worth living.

But Khadam was young. Only a few decades old, when it first started. And when she found Rodeiro - or rather, when he found her - and brought her into his new clan, he taught them all how to control themselves… To remain stable, while the Vision yet raged across humanity.

The Vision is not have to be your enemy, Khadam. It is merely a lens to see what threatens our existence.

Then, who is the enemy?

It did not take long for all of humanity to find out. Wallow in that state long enough - spend too much time watching the world fall apart - and the Herald would come.

While she slept, the herald did not come. Instead, all she saw, between the snatches of deep sleep, was the world crumbling into itself. Cracks running along the edges of the gate walker’s hull. Letting sand pour in as the metal separated into molecules. Flecks of carbon and metal alloys unzipping themselves from the whole. Floating up into the sky. And then, the sand too was breaking down - even as it poured over her. Becoming oxygen and silicon and other basic parts. Becoming less.

The first thing she did, when she woke up, was to check her hands. Then her arms, and her legs. Still groggy from her half-sleep, she struggled to take off her clothes and inspect every inch of herself in the mirror. She even asked Finder to scan her, and scan her again.

“Thirteen possible abnormalities detected,” he said. “Best guess is some early form of skin cancer from the radiation.”

“Good,” she breathed. The cancer was nothing. Since she had no plans to visit the surface of the planet anytime soon, the nanites in her blood would have more than enough time to work it out.

Khadam got up, and went to the water recycler. In her groginess, she forgot that why she had muted the aerisnet, and turned it back on. Before she could impulse a command to the recycler, a dozen or more voices screamed in her mind.

COME… OUT…

DIE…

“Right,” she said. And impulsed the net to mute itself. “Forgot about that. Guess we’re doing this manually.”

She tapped on the faucet until it began to trickle water into the sink. She cupped her hands, and took a few cold gulps of the tasteless, sterile recycled water. Better than nothing.

She found a clear spot in the hallway to stretch out her muscles, weary from being hunched over the bike for days. The floor was soft enough here that she didn’t mind sitting on the rubber walkway. Not like I’m in anyone’s way.

While she stretched, she had Finder parse the archives, the thousands of hours of recorded footage of the previous inhabitants.

“The gate reactor was empty. See if you can find out what happened to it. Was there a leak or-”

“Found it,” he said, and projected his screen out for her to see.

Khadam narrowed her eyes to see better.

There were two of them. One with black hair - shorter, and not yet so greasy. The other was tall and handsome, with nice shoulders and a serious face. Black Hair had called him Joira.

They were arguing about the gates. She could see the fresh slag in the video, still sizzling in place. In the background of the video, she could see the reactor, brimming with an orange light, which meant it was already dangerously low on fuel.

“This isn’t working,” Joira said. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“We have to,” Black Hair said, “We have to hope we get lucky.”

Khadam cringed. With the way they were calibrating the gates, there wasn’t a hope alive that they would “get lucky.” One in a billion wasn’t even close. The odds stacked against them were literally astronomical.

“We’re going to run out. And then what?”

“What other choice do we have, Joira?”

“I’m taking the shuttle.”

“No!” Black Hair said. It sounded like they had this argument before.

“I’m going to reconnect to the grid and figure this out.”

“I’m telling you, the grid is down. Otherwise we’d already be connected.”

“How can the whole grid be down? That doesn’t make sense. I’m going up.”

“Please,” Black Hair said, “Please don’t leave me here!”

But no matter how much he begged, Joira seemed set. He was going to take the only functioning shuttle, and head to the light dam.

It was an awful plan, Khadam thought. The light dams were unproven tech - unless they had made some massive improvements to the light dams while she was asleep. People didn’t go near them. Only the Children, and they were so new… So fragile. Soft, and easily confused.

And the scar...

Intoxicating. That was the word.

But Joira was set, and nothing Black Hair could do seemed to change his mind. Maybe Joira just needed time apart from his traveling companion. So she watched Joira set off into the landing bay, and climb into the last shuttle, while Black Hair banged on the door, sobbing. Begging for him to come back.

And then she saw it. Out of the corner, a glow of light.

Oh no, she thought. Tell me he didn’t just do that.

The reactor was on. But the flow was still connected to one of the slagged gates. It was just oozing light, infusing the useless metal which, because it wasn’t working, simply effervesced the all that light out into the air. She switched the camera, and saw the light levels plummeting. Saw the dark orange burn into red, into purple… into nothing.

The reactor should’ve stopped long before that. It should have a fail-safe trip that would trigger automatically at a certain threshold. But, for whatever reason, it didn’t. It buzzed an alarm, but because Black Hair was too busy pleading with Joira, neither of them noticed. And the light kept bleeding.

Enough energy to power a gate for thousands of years… Just gone.

And when Black Hair returned to the workstation, still wiping tears off his cheeks, he saw the flashing alert - and just swiped it away without even reading it - she did scream.

“Turn it off! No! Don’t sit down - stop crying and turn it off!”

This was why she had forty gates, all empty. All without power. All the cells of the reactor were empty. According to the logs, there were a few arrays buried somewhere in the storage… but that would only be enough to power the life support. And how am I supposed to set up solar panels with all those nomads around? And if she did-

Stop!

Khadam forced her spiraling thoughts to ground to a halt.

She took a slow, deep breath.

“What’s the first, smallest step?”

That’s where she needed to start.

First, she needed power. If she could power, she could keep the ship’s basic functions running and work on everything else. Then, she could figure out how to clean up the gates, getting the weapons online. Maybe, if she could find the parts, rebuild one of the drones, even.

“Maybe there’s an array in the cargo?” Finder suggested. “Or maybe there are emergency supplies somewhere?”

“The captain’s deck!” Khadam shouted. “That’s a great idea, Finder.” She slapped him affectionately on the dome of his head, making a gentle clang, before sprinting off up the stairs, climbing all the way to the highest deck. Given how small this gate walker was - compared to the ones that were used to set up entire jump lanes - the captain’s deck was actually just a captain’s quarters, on the top level. A small, twin-sized bed shoved into a corner between a recycler sink, and a floor-to-ceiling wardrobe.

She found a stowaway box under the bed, perfectly packed with everything a down-and-out ship would need, including a portable power array that, if unfolded in the sunlight, might actually provide some meaningful juice. It was meant for null gravity, but she thought she could make it work here - as long as none of the nomads got to it.

Now. How to get it out of the ship, without the nomads touching it?

“Can you show me the rest of the footage from Joira’s expedition? I want to see how the nomads react when he opens the doors.”

Finder flicked the video forward, until Joira was climbing into the shuttle. It was in the same airlock that Khadam had crawled in through.

Black Hair was silent now, watching Joira through the cameras. He sealed the airlock behind Joira, as the shuttle’s repulsors lifted it off the ground, to hover in that cavernous space.

Khadam watched as the external aperture opened. A mass of legs and hooked claws clambered into the airlocked aperture. Bodies raining down onto the shuttle, their claws and mandibles scrabbling to latch on to the smooth metal. Disgusting, she shuddered.

The shuttle struggled against their weight, rising higher and higher. And then, it slipped out of that aperture, crawling with nomads, and disappeared into the sky, still dropping bodies as it went.

The external aperture closed behind the shuttle, sealing dozens of nomads inside the cavern of the airlock.

“Safe to assume,” Khadam said, “the moment we open that cargo door, they’ll pour right in. The question is, did the nomads find a way in through the airlock?”

Finder sped up the video. First, the nomads scratched at the metal, scrambling like mad around the interior darkness. They spent most of their attention on the external aperture, and the door into the gate walker itself. Minutes turned to hours, into days. The nomads became less and less frantic. They were laying down now, or biting at each other. Long moments of lethargy, interspersed with frenzies of movement. Days turned to weeks, and within a month all the nomads were still. Their legs curled inward to their chests.

Simply disgusting.

“It looks like they couldn’t break through,” Finder said. “At least, I can’t find any record of it.”

Good enough. But one question tugged at her thoughts. “Did Joira ever come back?”

“His shuttle does not return. Nor does his face appear in the archives again.”

Khadam sighed. Maybe he’s still out there, she thought. Maybe he made it up to the dam.

Either way, it was a better fate than his black-haired friend. She could still see the bones, yellowing in the sunlight. Hanging from whatever the nomads had constructed out there.

If the nomads hadn’t been able to pull him out...

Then he must’ve left the gate walker on his own volition. The voices...

If only Black Hair had known how to navigate the admin commands. If only.

So, as long as she didn’t go into the airlock itself, she would be safe. She just needed to find a way to get the array working, and then she could work on the reactor’s light problem. Assuming the ship still has a way to pull light.

“Have you seen any drones, Finder? I mean, other than yourself.”

“No, not yet.”

“Maybe I can just...” Khadam thought out loud. What was the harm in trying it?

She sent a command to the aerisnet, turning the sound back on-

-Flesh… From… Bone. And Tear… You… And Eat…-

-and sent out a ping, specifically looking for drone responses. She wanted something heavy, but anything that could fly would do.

The floor all around her lit up with responses. Fragments of drone cores everywhere, scattered and bashed and scratched by a torch and what looked like a manual driver.

“Damn it!” she said. “He took apart the drones too? Why?”

But there was one response from upstairs. Buried deep in the habitation quarters. A full response.

-Die… Godthing… DIE-

Up in the habitation quarters, she had to send out another pulse. It was stuffed in the back of shared closet, blocked by someone’s bookshelf. She pushed the shelf over, and pulled open the door.

Underneath a pile of dust-filled clothes, there it was.

A printer.

It was a small thing. Meant for personal use only.

But she was Khadam. She was a cold smith - and a damn good one, according to Rodeiro himself.

The voices were still shouting at her, taunting her, trying to infest her thoughts, “You… Will… Come… Out…”

Khadam smiled.

Oh, you bet I’m coming out.

And when I do, you’re going to wish you'd never said a word to me.